Getting a PDF of your Form - Inserting Merge Fields into Word (Mac)

For administrators. How to insert merge fields into your Microsoft Word templates, on a Mac Computer.

1. Introduction

This document is for administrators. It explains how to use the Merge Field Manager tool to get your forms ready for Damstra Forms. This guide is for Microsoft Word on Mac OSX. If you have access to a Windows computer then we recommend that you use the APE Word Add-in instead.

UPDATE: Microsoft's latest versions of Word for Mac have a different way of working with merge fields, which is like that in Word on PCs. If you have a recent version of Word for Mac (2013 or 2016) then please follow Inserting Merge Fields into Word (Windows).

To start, we’ll walk through the process of adding the merge fields from an APE template into the corresponding word document. We’ll use the DOC from the simple tutorial. That word document without the merge fields looks like this:

2. Inserting Merge Fields using Word for Mac

2.1 Summary

1. Export the Merge Fields from Damstra Forms.
2. Open your Word Document
3. Open the Mail Merge Manager
4. Open the .csv file
5. Change the field delimiter to a comma
6. Drag and drop all the merge fields into the appropriate locations
7. Edit Signature fields to prepend the merge field name with “Image:”
8. Save and upload to the template in Damstra Forms

2.2 Step-by-step

1. Export the Merge Fields from Damstra Forms. This will download a .csv file (a Comma Separated Values file)

2. Open your Word Document
3. Open the Mail Merge Manager

4. Click Create New, and select Form Letters

5. Click Get List, and select Open Data Source

6. Select the file containing the merge fields that you exported from Damstra Forms. It is usually called merge_fields.csv.

7. Click Open.

8. Select Mac OS, and Western (Mac OS Roman), and click OK (these should be the defaults).Sometimes Word does not ask you about this.

9. Set the Field delimiter to a comma, leave the Record delimiter as “(enter)”, and click OK (Note, the default field delimiter is “(Tab)”). Sometimes Word does not ask you about this.

10. Drag and drop the Merge Fields into the appropriate areas.

11. Drop all the Merge Fields into their relevant sections.

12. Note that signatures are a special case. By default, they will insert the text “Signed in Damstra Forms” if a signature is present. If you would prefer to insert the actual signature, then you need to edit the merge field and insert “Image:” into the beginning of the name. To do this, right-click on the Signature field.

13. Select Toggle Field Codes

14. Add “Image:” before Signature in the Merge Field code. This ensures that an image of the signature shows up in the final form.

15. Save the merged document. You may want to append “_merged” to the file name to indicate that it contains merge fields. In this case, we used “APE Supervisors Diary_merged.doc”.

16. Back in Damstra Froms, edit the template and click Browse to begin Upload new MS Word template.
17. A chooser should appear that allows you to select the new version of the document containing the merge fields.
18. Select your newly merged document then scroll down and click Save to update the draft MS Word template.

19. You can now preview it to check for mistakes, as shown in the video Template Creation Basics 4: Final Steps.